One by one, his competitors cracked. With only a half mile remaining, it was down to two. Jorge Torres glanced over at his larger, imposing competitor and knew he couldn’t afford to let it go down to a kick. His instincts screamed: go now.

His coach had warned him to exercise caution, run a conservative race. A top 10 finish, he believed, would be great. But Torres had his own expectations. He remembers the scene now from the kitchen of his rustic Colorado log cabin home; a hideaway tucked alongside a mountain stream between two foreboding mountains dotted with twisted pines that rise defiantly from the earth like the scraggly facial hair of an old salt. He looks directly at you through steely dark eyes whose intensity belies his flushed cheeks and angelic facial features, and in a voice utterly devoid of the chest-thumping bravado so ubiquitous among today’s athletes he says matter-of-factly, "I was going for victory."

Descending a hill he hammered, gaining a precious few strides of separation between himself and his adversary. With utter abandon he ran for the tape, and when he crossed first he pumped his fists skyward in triumph, for he had just won the national championship. In the next instant he made eye contact with his father and his coach. Their broad smiles and expressions of joyous disbelief filled his being with pride. And he knew, right then, he wanted to take this running thing to the moon.

Jorge Torres was 11 years old.

Precocious Plans

The date was December 12, 1992. On November 25th, 2002, almost exactly one decade—and many milestones—later, Torres, a University of Colorado senior, won the NCAA Cross Country championship in Terre Haute, IN, in a race he finds markedly similar to that one years earlier. In victory, Torres joins fellow Colorado Buffalo Adam Goucher as the only male American collegian to pull off the feat in the last decade. And by dint of identical twin brother Edwardo’s 10th place finish in Terre Haute, the Torri, as the Torres twins are called, moved to the premiere slot on the all-time list of sibling performances at the NCAA championship.

Ed wasn’t there in Mobile, AL when it all began in December of ’92. The youngest of Jose and Maria Torres’ five children (Jorge’s got him by 10 minutes), he rode to Chicago’s O’Hare airport with his older brother Danny to pick up Jorge, his father and their coach, Greg Fedeski. He still remembers seeing Jorge descend from the escalator to the baggage claim area smiling broadly, trophy in hand. He noted how happy everyone was and thought it was pretty cool. Moreover, he realized if Jorge could do it, so could he. "I’m exactly the same as he is," Ed thought, "there’s no reason I can’t do it, too." By the following afternoon, Ed was running. It wouldn’t be long before he, too, would be making a name for himself on the national scene.

That year, however, Jorge was the story. In the spring of his sixth grade year, still all of four-foot nothin’, Jorge won the state championship for his age group in the mile in an astonishing 4:56. For Jorge, that race proved that he could excel on the track as well as over hill and dale. And for Fedeski, Torres’ coach at both MacArthur Junior High and during the summer with the Prospect Heights Running Club, it removed any doubt that Jorge was a flash in the pan. He’d been coaching for 25 years at that point, and as he recalls, "He just kept improving, and improving, and improving."

Realizing he was the steward of a once-in-a-lifetime talent, Fedeski sat Jorge down at the beginning of his seventh grade year and had him write down his running goals for the future. While Fedeski laughs at how ambitious some of Jorge’s goals were, like running 1:45 for the 800 and under 3:55 for the mile in high school, he knew that for Jorge, wanting to be a Foot Locker National champion and an NCAA champion wasn’t farfetched. In fact, by Jorge’s reckoning he’s met 95% of the goals he set for himself as a 12-year-old. More importantly, Fedeski imparted to Jorge the challenge that lay ahead. As Jorge recalls, "He told me that with this talent I had, that I needed to work hard, keep myself down to earth, and be a good, well-rounded person... I took that to heart and I try to remember that always."

Becoming a Team

Through middle school, Jorge excelled, eventually running 4:31 for the mile as an eighth-grader. Ed wasn’t too far behind. It wasn’t until Ed was a freshman at Wheeling High School, however, that he adopted Jorge’s single-mindedness. It was then—after the Illinois state meet at the end of their freshman cross country season, when under Illinois state rules they were allowed once more to train with Fedeski—that Fedeski sat Ed down and had the same conversation he’d had with Jorge three years earlier. While Jorge, already looking beyond the confines of the Land of Lincoln, was training for the Foot Locker Midwest regional, (where he finished sixth, paving the way for a run of four straight appearances at the National Championships—an unprecedented feat), Ed was indifferent. In no uncertain terms, Fedeski let Ed know he expected him to join Jorge at the national championships as a sophomore.

Ed now felt that he too had Fedeski’s seal of approval. "He was telling me," he says, "he saw something in me as well. I dedicated my life then to pursuing my running, and I’ve been doing it ever since."

But not all were supportive. Early on in the fall of his freshman campaign, Jorge felt Mark Saylor, the Wheeling coach, scoffed at his lofty ambitions, and by spring, as is too often the case in the United States, Wheeling High’s interval-rich diet of speed had him looking (in his own words) "like a porker" and stagnating. Once 5 feet, 6 inches and 115 (still his current racing weight), he had ballooned to 135. While his mile best had improved marginally, to 4:29, in a workout at the beginning of the summer Fedeski clocked him running significantly slower than a year earlier. Jorge was frustrated and to Fedeski’s trained eye, "looked sluggish. I said, ‘Forget this. I am not leaving them alone any more. They’re running with me.’"

The twins concurred that if they were to get their careers back on track, they had to go back to doing what worked. If that meant getting up at 4 A.M. to meet Fed for a workout at MacArthur Junior High and then running the high school regimen in the afternoon, so be it. There were goals to chase.

For the next three years they trained daily with Fedeski in the early morning hours, and the exhaustive regimen paid off. Both re-emerged on the national scene as sophomores, but for their insistence on working together the trio also weathered a torrent of criticism—from the community, classmates, the Wheeling administration—through the remainder of their high school days. The twins’ success, Fedeski says, "was vindication for me. Jorge and Ed made all it all worthwhile."

Family Faith

For his guidance, the twins’ credit Fedeski. As for their uncommon work ethic, they laud their parents. Jose Torres arrived in Chicago from Mexico, penniless and tireless. For years he worked as a clerk in a jewelry store until he’d cobbled enough money together to open a a modest storefront of his own on 26th Street in a Hispanic neighborhood on Chicago’s south side. Jorge’s eyes soften as he relates how, for 10 years, his father worked ceaselessly, never taking so much as a single day off, to grow the business. For Jose and Javier, the twins’ two eldest brothers, conscription into the business was a necessity. For Danny, the third-born, it was a matter of choice. And by the time the twins were in middle school, the business was taking off.

Still, the expectation was that they too would join the family in the business come high school. It’s only recently that Danny, now 26, revealed to them that he intervened with their father on their behalf. Danny was a runner, had run when Tim Broe was tearing up the Illinois prep scene, and it was he who suggested they sign up in middle school. In his younger brothers he saw the gift he saw in Broe. Danny implored his father, let them run. His father listened.

"What my brother did," Jorge says, "that showed my brother believed in us, my father believed in us." One day they too will join the business. But then, as now, they run to the best of their of ability to reward their family’s faith in them, not out of obligation, but out of love.

Tasting the World

By his junior year of high school, Fedeski felt Jorge was ready to test his chops on the world level. One week before the Foot Locker National Championships, he sent Jorge to the U.S. Junior Cross Country championships knowing the effort would fatigue him for Foot Locker (Jorge finished second there, Ed sixth) but, as always, looking long term. Running 8K for the first time, Jorge finished third, qualifying for the World Junior Championships that spring. Running against the best juniors in the world in Marrakech, Morocco, was a transforming experience. He looked around at the senior runners like Bob Kennedy and Adam Goucher, and realized, he says, he’d made it to another level. Jorge finished a respectable 37th in his first world championship. Still, he was over two minutes in arrears of the World Junior Champion, and eventual 2000 5,000m Olympic Champion, Million Wolde of Ethiopia. He took note.

A Foot Locker title in Jorge’s senior year, in 1999, confirmed that he was still at the head of his class. But before he could repeat the feat on the track, politics intervened. His own athletic director turned him in to the Illinois state athletic association for training with Fedeski in-season after he won a 5,000m race indoors at Butler University against a field of collegiate runners that he was using as a tuneup for the World Junior Championships. Though eventually reinstated after a protracted process that concluded with a meeting with the IHSAA board in Bloomington, IL, he’d lost any desire to run in a Wheeling vest. Ed, still playing catch-up to his brother six years later, competed for the two of them that spring, and learned a valuable lesson: "It was the first time I realized how big a part of my training Jorge was. It was pretty difficult without him."

Becoming a Buffalo

That summer they moved to Boulder early to kick start the next phase of their lives. That fall, running as if to remind people he hadn’t disappeared, Jorge tore through his freshman cross country campaign, finishing second in each race he ran, until the NCAA championships. There, for the first time ever, he bombed, finishing 47th. Worse, a freshman, Kenyan David Kimani, had crushed the field. Though disappointed, he responded with preternatural maturity: "I realized that I’d had a great season. It was just one bad race, and everyone is entitled to a bad race. More than anything, it was a wake-up call for me."

Back in Boulder the Torri went to Coach Mark Wetmore’s office to plan the next step. Jorge reaffirmed his commitment to CU, though he expressed doubt that he’d ever catch the likes of Kimani. As Jorge recalls, Wetmore quelled his reservations. "He said, ‘Don’t worry, you keep working; he may be unstoppable now, but keep working and we’ll see.’ That was a big turning point for me."

Wetmore doesn’t recall directly addressing Jorge’s concerns about Kimani, but he says, "I’m confident enough, or arrogant enough, to think that if you come into our program and stay in it and put your heart in it, that in two and a half years, you’ll be a very different runner. So I’m inclined to promise people, don’t worry about so-and-so, there’s a good chance they won’t be a factor in two years, which is a fact of life in distance running, and there’s a good chance you’ll be more of a factor. So I make a two, two and a half year promise to a lot of people."

It only took six months. By year’s end Jorge had run 13:43 for 5K and earned All-America honors undercover and outdoors. Moreover, his time eclipsed Goucher’s CU freshman 5K record. While beating Goucher’s mark wasn’t an explicit goal, it was significant nonetheless. "It showed I was capable of running on his level. It showed the talent is in me. In my mind I knew I had it, I just had to go out there and show it."

For the next two years, Jorge improved steadily, learning from his older teammates all the while. "One thing I learned was that you can’t be injury-free and hammer everyday. My freshman and sophomore year I did that and I did get hurt. My junior year, I realized I couldn’t do that; I need to take days off. I may lose a day, but in the long run, I’ll be gaining. I just have to be patient."

Injury-free, Jorge thrived, finishing second at the 2001 NCAA Cross Country Championships, Indoor Championships (5,000m) and Outdoor Championships (5,000m). But these accomplishments pale in comparison to his second place finish against America’s finest post-collegians at the U.S. Cross Country Championships and his 11th place finish at the World Cross Country Championships in Dublin in March 2002.

Taking on the World

Torres was running in the lead pack of the 4K race at the U.S. Championships when, at 2K, he fearlessly burst from the pack. Only Tim Broe responded. They battled to the end, Broe barely prevailing.

Torres departed for Dublin flush with the knowledge he could compete with America’s best, but wondering if he had the marbles to lay it down with the best in the world. The moment of truth came midway through the World Championship, when he passed Matt Lane and saw only a sea of Africans before him. "Alright," he thought, "this is the World Championships; there’s no time to be afraid here."

One by one he picked them off, paper lions all, racing literally to the line, where he was barely out-leaned for 10th by World Championship 1500m medalist Driss Maazouzi. In the chute, five spots back, was none other than 1998 World Junior Champion and 2000 Olympic 5,000m champion Million Wolde. He thought of Fedeski, his family, Wetmore. They were right. He could compete with anybody in the world.

But if that moment represented a paradigm shift for Torres, Wetmore insists it was only in his own mind. Says Wetmore, "He has a unique—and I mean unique, one and only—balance of very intense desire but carefulness as well. If you look at the other two outstanding graduates of our program, Alan Culpepper and Adam Goucher, Jorge is a very cool combination of both."

In Jorge you see Culpepper’s flawless biomechanics and easygoing nature. And you see Goucher’s relentless competitiveness and deceptive ballistic speed. Torres called upon each of these qualities this November, when after four long years, he used his guile, his cool efficiency, his iron will, and ultimately, his wheels, to beat Kimani, the 1999 cross country and 2002 outdoor 5,000m champion, Boaz Cheboiywo, the defending cross country champ, and Alistair Cragg, the 2002 indoor 5,000m champion, in a race for the ages to win his first NCAA title.

Torres now takes dead aim at his 13:26 5K PR. He knows it’s soft. And he’s aware of Bill McChesney’s American collegiate 5,000m record of 13:15, set back in 1981. But, true to form, he’s already looking one and a half years down the line, to Athens, where he just might be in a position to check off the number one goal he’d set for himself as a wide-eyed 12-year-old boy.

Twin brothers Chris (older, five minutes) and Tim Lear eagerly anticipate going head to head with the Torri—in hoops, that is.